Shakespeare and the Press: the Ideological Appropriation of Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare and the Press:
      the Ideological Appropriation of Romeo and Juliet

                                            Clara Calvo
                                        UNIVERSIDAD DE MURCIA

W
           ith the advent of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, readers of Renaissance studies cri-
           tical literature have become familiar with a textual strategy frequently used by practitioners of
           both critical trends: an initial narrative or anecdote usually opens the article. This anecdote is
often in the form of a “non-literary” text and, despite its non-literary status, this text is placed shoulder
to shoulder with other “literary” texts. This textual strategy responds, on the one hand, to the interest
both critical trends have in bringing down the walls which have traditionally been erected between lite-
rary and non-literary texts and, on the other, to an interest in showing how a given cultural practice inte-
racts and informs other contemporary cultural practices. I would like then to borrow this textual strategy
from the practices of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism in order to show how non-literary texts
from several non-tabloid British newspapers interact with a well-known literary text. From these non-lite-
rary texts, one can obtain a narrative which involves several daily British newspapers, a British school and
Shakespeare. The interest of this narrative is that it offers a chance to observe the interplay of three con-
temporary British cultural practices: Shakespeare as the Bard, i.e. as a national icon or institution, edu-
cation and the Press, while at the same time, in this narrative one can witness the appropriation of
Shakespeare by the educational establishment and the Press for their own ideological aims.
     In January 1994, a story featuring the headmistress of a British school was turned into front-page
news. Jane Brown, the headmistress of Kingsmead Primary School, a school in Hackney, East London,
refused to accept, on behalf of the school’s pupils, some subsidised tickets offered by the Paul Hamlyn
Foundation for a ballet version of Romeo and Juliet, which was being performed at the Royal Opera
House in London. The ballet, Kenneth Macmillan’s production with Prokofiev’s music, was said to be clo-
sely based on Shakespeare’s play. Allegedly, the reason given by Jane Brown for refusing the tickets was
that she did not consider the performance fit for the pupils on the grounds that the story of Romeo and
Juliet privileges heterosexual love at the expense of other forms of sexuality. The headmistress was repor-
ted to have said that Romeo and Juliet was “entirely about heterosexual love”1, and that “until books,
films and the theatre reflected all forms of sexuality, she would not be involving her pupils in heterose-
xual culture”2.
     The pupils of Kingsmead Primary School did not attend the Royal Opera House performance of the
ballet, but the headmistress was obliged to face an inquiry and apologise. Her apology did not appease
anybody and there were voices calling for disciplinary action. The media nype created around her and
the zeal with which journalists started probing into her sexuality and her private life turned Jane Brown’s
life into an ordeal: newspaper stories revealed that she had recently set up home with another woman,
Nicky Thorogood, and her three children. Thorogood, a governor in the school, was acting as chairper-
son in the school governing body which appointed Brown as headmistress. It was also said that she had

14                                             CLARA CALVO

previously applied for the post and had failed to obtain it.
     An investigation was then launched into her domestic arrangements and her designation as head-
mistress. Not only was a conflict of interest seen as having taken place at her appointment but there were
also allegations that she had benefited from “interview coaching” and help from the people who would
later interview her for the post. The issue of whether to suspend her or not while further enquires were
carried out divided school governors and local councillors: parents and governors sided with Brown and
refused to dismiss her while Labour councillors, eager to get rid of the “loony-left” label born by Labour-
controlled Hackney Council, repeatedly demanded the headmistress’s head. It was not clear at all who
had power over whom: governors and parents over Labour local educational authority or vice versa.
Voices again were heard, this time calling for John Patten, the Education Secretary, to intervene. The
irony of the situation did not escape political commentators who noticed that Patten’s dilemma was
worse than Hamlet’s: if Patten were to stick to Tory educational policy and defend the power a previous
Tory government had transferred from local authorities to parents in the 1988 Act, he was inevitably hel-
ping to keep in office a lesbian, politically-correct headmistress who had publicly denied Shakespeare his
place in education; whereas, if he wanted to give this lesbian troublemaker her due, then not only was
he forced to support a much-hated inner city Labour education authority but he would also expose him-
self to the slings and arrows of criticism for preaching one thing and doing another3. What had started
as a routine decision about school activities and the place of Shakespeare in the curriculum, turned into
a nasty national debate on how schools are run and who has the ultimate say in schools4.
     The incident in itself might perhaps seem to be of little consequence for the study of Shakespeare,
but the way in which most of the British broadsheets chose to report it is of some interest to the practi-
tioners of Cultural Materialism and Shakespeare studies. Although it later put a spanner in the works of
Tory educational policy, at the onset, the Hackney affair was about political correctness and the teaching
of Shakespeare and, mostly, it was about Romeo and Juliet. The incident, or rather the way in which it
was reported by the Press and the comments it aroused, offers a chance to listen to people other than
Shakespearean critics and scholars expressing their views on the play. Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the
one Shakespearean play everybody has heard of: people may quote the most famous line in Shakespeare
without ever wondering who Hamlet was, but most people in Britain today know that Romeo and Juliet
were young lovers who died tragically. The so-called balcony scene is so ubiquitous that it even found its
way onto the now extinct version of the £20 note. It is hardly surprising then that Jane Brown’s words
dismissing the play as “blatantly heterosexual” and “entirely about heterosexual love”, which were quo-
ted ad nauseam in all the national newspapers, had the power to unleash such a torrent of voices prai-
sing the play. The Daily Telegraph said Romeo and Juliet was “a great work of art”5 and The Times called
the play “the world’s most famous love story”6. In The Guardian, the play was said to be “a masterpie-
ce”7 and in The Independent it was referred to as “one of Shakespeare’s best known and best loved
plays”8. Everybody, except Jane Brown, seemed to think that Romeo and Juliet is a beautiful love story.
Not a tragedy, of course, but just a story, and not about anything else but love. Most people in Britain,
if asked, would no doubt have shared the views expressed by Colin Beadle, a Liberal Democrat counci-
llor in Hackney, who was quoted as saying: “Why do these people insist on walking straight into trouble?
How can you say that a beautiful, traditional love story like this is not politically correct?”9.
     The claim that Romeo and Juliet is the world’s most famous love story is of course difficult to prove
and perhaps it could have been toned down with one of those adverbs such as “probably” or “arguably”
which beer slogan writers are so fond of. However calling the play a masterpiece is likely to raise some

SHAKESPEARE AND THE PRESS: THE IDEOLOGICAL APPROPRIATION OF ROMEO AND JULIET                15

eyebrows since Shakespearean criticism has always felt inclined to consider the play an imperfect tragedy.
Also, the play may be well-known, as the newspapers claim, but one suspects that it is in fact far from
being known well, particularly when one finds that people think of Romeo and Juliet in terms of little
more than a beautiful love story. In fact, in the articles which sprouted in the British Press as a result of
the Hackney affair, there were times in which instead of presenting Romeo and Juliet as a Love Story, the
play was seen as a West Side Story. One of Jane Brown’s colleagues was quoted in several non-tabloid
newspapers saying that it was not so much the heterosexual incorrectness of the play that bothered the
headmistress but the feuding between the Montagues and the Capulets:
    “She is not trying to promote homosexuality,” he said. “All she was trying to do was to prevent the
    children being fed a constant diet of gang fights and killing. The school is on the edge of a notorious
    estate and showing yet more male stereotyping, feuding and knives is no joke. Shakespeare wrote
    brilliantly about gang fights, teenage sexuality and suicide. But we want the children to look at other
    worlds. We want them to see that you can be a boy and be gentle.”10

     Jane Brown’s unnamed colleague seems to have in mind a 20th century New York à la West Side
Story as the only possible mise-en-scène for the play and he also seems to think that Romeo and Juliet is
“blatantly” violent and “entirely” about sex and violence.
     The reporting of the incident by The Daily Telegraph shows how Shakespeare can be appropriated
by a newspaper for its own political ends. The Telegraph clearly turned the reporting of the affair into a
site of ideological struggle. In a front-page article which begins by reporting the headmistress’s apology,
The Telegraph took advantage of the resonance usually achieved by anything bearing the name of
Shakespeare to stage an indirect attack against the Institute of Education and against those teachers
whose left-wing ideology is put to use in schools. The article places this attack immediately after remin-
ding its readership, for no apparent reason, that despite the inquiry and the apology, the headmistress
had not been suspended from office and remained in charge of the school:
    Ms Brown was not suspended and was continuing to run the school.
    She received a Bachelor of Education degree from Avery Hill College, London, and holds a Master of
    Arts from the Institute of Education.
    The Institute is the most influential teacher-training centre in the country. Its critics claim that the
    ideology of its predominantly Left-wing staff percolates throughout the education system11.

     However, more worrying than this ideological attack masquerading as relevant information is the fact
that the Hackney headmistress is presented as a left-wing teacher while the only “left-wing” ideas The
Telegraph attributes to her are a case of political-correctness (firefighters versus firemen), encouraging
children to use first-names when addressing teachers and suppressing Nativity plays and Christmas par-
ties from school activities:
    Mrs Sandra Curtis thought that Ms Brown had made too many changes since becoming headmistress
    two years ago. Nativity plays and Christmas parties had been replaced by a short pantomime becau-
    se of the multi-ethnic nature of the school. Children were encouraged to call staff by their first names.
    Fifteen-year old Helen Curtis, a former pupil, said: “She seems a lot more on girls” side than boys”
    side.

16                                              CLARA CALVO

     “Once at the school fete I wrote a sign saying “firemen park here”. She had a go at me and told me
     to write “firefighters park here’.”12
     The textual strategy employed by The Telegraph is now exposed: the headmistress is presented as
having left-wing ideas mostly because of her insistence on “politically-correct” attitudes; the headmistress
is also presented as depriving her pupils of an important part of their national heritage –Shakespeare the
national poet– and she is therefore constructed as a threat to the educational establishment; the inevi-
table conclusion of all this seems to be that left-wing ideas are a danger if they “percolate” down to scho-
ols and pupils, because they result in the disintegration of the nation’s cultural heritage. By means of this
way of reasoning, Shakespeare is appropriated by the newspaper for conservative ideological ends: since
left-wing, lesbian teachers such as Jane Brown deprive their pupils of the joy of being acquainted with
the Bard, one can assume that left-wing ideas are inseparable from a desire to abolish Shakespeare from
schools.
     It is important, therefore, to remember that left-wing Renaissance scholars who have written on the
issue of Shakespeare and education hold very different views from those of the Hackney headmistress.
Most politically-aware Shakespearean scholars would endorse the idea that by pulling Shakespeare out
of syllabuses, school teachers may think that they are challenging the iconography of upper and middle-
class culture, when in fact what they are doing is simply depriving their pupils of contact with a signifi-
cant part of the dominant culture, and this inevitably renders the pupils even more powerless. One of
these Shakespearean scholars has precisely issued a warning about the risks involved in attitudes to
Shakespeare such as those of the Hackney headmistress, which rather than posing a threat to the esta-
blishment, help to preserve it in place:
     They are profoundly mistaken however if they believe that by the simple gesture of ignoring the ico-
     nography of the dominant culture its self-evident irrelevance will result in its withering away. The
     child in the school party reared on rock music and the packaged simplicities of television, who gazes
     uncomprehendingly up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is in significant ways as powerless as his
     ancestors who stood for centuries in churches across Europe amid the cadences of the Latin Mass.13

    The Telegraph continues its appropriation of Shakespeare for conservative ideological ends in anot-
her article which appeared in the Arts section of the same issue.14 This article -fittingly entitled “A plague
on the houses of all subverters”- takes advantage of the Romeo and Juliet incident in order to warn the
newspaper’s readership about the dangers of readings of Shakespeare which “subvert” the Bard, whet-
her from the Left or from the Right:
     There is a danger though that Shakespeare can be hijacked, by both Left and Right. Far from being
     and irrelevant “dead white male”, as the politically correct tend to dismiss him, his plays constantly
     reflect current events, and his views can be distorted into representing almost any point of view.15

    The author of this article also claims that the plays of Shakespeare –or at least Romeo and Juliet–
have a single, unique “moral” that Shakespeare represented “mankind” and that “no one has ever had a
thought that doesn’t find an echo somewhere in Shakespeare”16. The claims that “Shakespeare can be
hijacked” and that “his views can be distorted” obviously rest on the belief that Shakespeare’s plays have
“a meaning” which is “one” “unique” and “universal”, a single meaning which is there in the texts and

SHAKESPEARE AND THE PRESS: THE IDEOLOGICAL APPROPRIATION OF ROMEO AND JULIET                    17

which the subverters wilfully ignore and malevolently subvert. This vision of Shakespeare as the reposi-
tory of universal, indestructible truths and as the expression of the essence of “man” is an interpretive
position which has been repeatedly contested during the last two decades by most contemporary criti-
cism of Shakespeare, including not only Cultural Materialism or New Historicism but also feminism,
Marxism and psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare. Feminist critics, together with Third World cri-
tics, have often complained that “when texts are said to speak for humankind, humankind often shrinks
radically to include only those within a traditional pale of privilege”17. In fact, the call for impartial, objec-
tive interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays which is launched from the Arts section of The Telegraph is in
itself contributing to foreground conservative ideology: apolitical readings, i.e. readings which are blind
to the political implications of Shakespeare’s plays, are necessarily conservative because their silence
implicitly accepts the status quo, i.e. the inequalities of race, gender and class which existed in
Shakespeare’s society and still exist in ours. It could be further argued that objective, apolitical readings,
the readings devoid of all kinds of ideological pollution which are demanded by the author of the
Telegraph article, are nothing but a utopian desideratum on his part, because, as recent criticism of
Shakespeare keeps reminding us, we inevitably bring our own preconceptions and prejudices with us
when we approach Shakespeare’s plays and therefore those attempts which try to “re-discover”
Shakespeare as he really was, hoping to liberate him from the distortion of 20th-century ideological pre-
occupations, must necessarily be misguided.18
     Ideological appropriations are often achieved through extremely complex processes, partly because
if they were overt, transparent and easily detected, their effect would be greatly diminished. In this case,
the author of the Telegraph article appropriates Shakespeare for the newspaper’s conservative ideology
at the same time that he warns about distortions from both the Right and the Left and condemns those
who “seek to subvert Shakespeare for their own ends”19. The writer gives his intentions away when he
claims: “Happily, the Bard is big enough to survive all the theorising, both lunatic and serious, that he
attracts”20. With this denial of the value of multiple interpretations, he is appropriating –or reinventing–
Shakespeare for conservative ideology. The belief underlying this claim is that Shakespeare’s plays
express universal, eternal truths which cannot be tainted or destroyed by left-wing, politically-aware, ide-
ologically-conscious and historically-oriented criticism.
     Unfortunately, this shallow, uncomplicated approach to Romeo and Juliet is not only favoured by
right-wing Daily Telegraph contributors or by politically-correct school teachers. Even in The Guardian,
the play is thought to be a simple, straight-forward story. In an article entitled “Much ado about a liberal
playwright”, Martin Kettle presents Romeo and Juliet as a universal myth whose meaning is clearly pac-
kaged to be delivered on demand, although, unfortunately, he does not say what this meaning is:
    As Shakespeare plays go, Romeo and Juliet is not one of the more difficult ones. It is also, by a long
    way, one of the most popular. Romeo and Juliet is among Shakespeare’s few truly mythic plots... It
    is also, ironically, one of the most overtly moral and liberal plays in the whole canon. There is no
    mystery either about its themes or about Shakespeare’s message.21

    Whether it is seen as a simple love story, as a West Side Story or as a universal myth, the effect this
reductionism has on the play is the same: there is little room left for political considerations. Issues such
as the role played by gender and power relations, or the significance of the civil war between Capulets
and Montagues in a society whose obsolete feudal structures are beginning to be replaced by the modern

18                                                 CLARA CALVO

state and the emergent figure of the absolutist monarch, are ignored in these easy-to-swallow approaches
to the play which are handed out by British broadsheets. In the dominant reading of Romeo and Juliet
as a love-story for teenagers, the deep political implications of the play are erased, the love-story is decon-
textualised and the fighting is divested of its social significance.
     Amongst the polyphony of voices in the newspaper texts of the Hackney affair, the only voice which
seemed to hold Romeo and Juliet as more than a simple love story or a universal myth was that of Roy
Hattersley. In an article published in The Guardian at the time of the Hackney affair, he argues that, in
Shakespeare’s play, Verona is not a nice exotic background for a love story but rather a society, not unli-
ke post-Thacherite Britain, ripe with social and political conflict 22. In fact, Hattersley shows that it is the
social as well as the domestic inadequacies of the Verona families that brings the tragedy about:
     The Capulets’ attitude to family values was particularly deplorable - not least because they were the
     sort of people who were supposed to set an example to the rest of the city. They seemed to take no
     interest in their daughter at all, until they decided to marry her off to one of their friends. It is not sur-
     prising that she appears in public in her underclothes, hangs about derelict buildings and spends the
     night with her boyfriend. And the girl is only 14! It is a miracle that she has not become a one-parent
     family by the end of Act Two.23

     Hattersley also draws attention to how the play glorifies rebellion against power and authority: rebe-
llion against social order that prevents Montagues and Capulets from marrying each other, rebellion
against parents who are tyranical with their daughters, rebellion against political power which dictates
norms of conduct for the citizens of Verona. Politically, the efforts made by the rulers to preserve law and
order are ineffectual and this also contributes to the tragic end of several young people.24
     Hattersley’s voice was a rara avis in the broadsheet coverage of the Hackney affair. The impression
one obtains from a mere look at the reporting of the incident in the so-called “quality” press is that we
might have to get used to the existence of very different versions of the play we were wont to call Romeo
and Juliet, not owing this time to the differences between Q1, Q2 and F, but rather to the gap which
keeps popular imagination estranged from scholarly interpretation. Interestingly, one of the things to be
learnt from the reporting of the Hackney affair in the British Press is that both the left-wing, politically-
correct headmistress and the conservative article in the Arts section of right-wing Telegraph advocate
similarly reactionary readings of Romeo and Juliet. The headmistress reduces the play to a heterosexual
love-story and the newspaper article reduces it to a story which shows “the futility and waste of gang war-
fare” 25. For both of them, Romeo and Juliet is just a sad love-story peppered with the irrational street
violence of gang-fights. In the wake of the Hackney affair, one fears, the play is seen by many as the
Elizabethan equivalent of a daily dose of TV violence with a dash of romance.

NOTES
1
  The Daily Telegraph, 20 January 1994, p.1. Incidentally, in quoting these words, the newspapers were problably
wanting to draw attention to the use of the word “heterosexual”, although perhaps the word that deserves attention
in this quote is “entirely”.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE PRESS: THE IDEOLOGICAL APPROPRIATION OF ROMEO AND JULIET                     19

2
    The Times, 20 Jan 1994, p.1.
3
    See the leading article entitled “Lacking the authority” in The Guardian, 27 January 1994, p.21.
4
    See the leading article entitled “After Romeo”, in The Times, 28 January 1994, p.15.
5
    The Daily Telegraph, 20 January 1994, p.1.
6
    The Times, 20 January 1994, p.1.
7
    The Guardian, 20 January 1994, p.1.
8
    The Independent, 21 January 1994, p.3.
9
    The Times, 20 January 1994, p.1. The italics are mine.
10
     The Times, 20 January 1994, p.1.
11
     The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1994, p.2.
12
     The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1994, p.2.
13
  David Hornbrook, “Go play, boy, play”: Shakespeare and educational drama” in Graham Holderness, ed., The
Shakespeare Myth, (Manchester, 1988), p.154.
14
     Charles Spencer, “A plague on the houses of all subverters”, The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1994, p.17.
15
     The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1994., p.17.
16
     The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1994., p.17.
17
  Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, (New
York and London, 1987), p.4.
18
   See, for example, Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare, (London and New York, 1992), Gary Taylor,
Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present, (London, 1990), and Brian
Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels, (New Haven and London, 1993). See also
Hornbrook, op. cit., p.157.
19
     The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1994, p.17.
20
     The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1994, p.17.
21
     The Guardian, 22 January 1994, p.23.
22
     See Roy Hattersley, “Lesson to learn from a tale of two boroughs”, The Guardian, 24 January 1994, p.17.
23
     Hattersley, op. cit., p.17.
24
  Hattersley’s reading of the play is not of course the first politically-aware reading of Romeo and Juliet. Kiernan
Ryan has offered a reading that transcends the received image of the play as a tragedy which simply dramatizes a
love-story-cum-family-feud. For Ryan, Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy of two lovers bound by the sexual norms and
social practices of Verona: i.e. by material and ideological forces. They are defeated, not by “the universal and immu-
table tragedy of the human condition” but by “a particular social construction which is open to dispute and there-
fore open to be changed”.(See Kiernan Ryan, “Romeo and Juliet: the language of tragedy” in Willie Van Peer, The
Taming of the Text: Explorations in Language, Literature and Culture, (London and New York, 1988), pp.106-121.)
25
     The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1994, p.17.